Quotes About Language

What words openly declare can be tested against empirical evidence, but what words insinuate can bypass that safeguard. Even an innocent-sounding phrase like "income distribution," endlessly repeated, can suggest a process in which income exists somehow and is then distributed, as one might distribute food at a dinner table or gifts at Christmas.

In short, hysteria is a type of language in which communication is effected by means of pictures (or iconic signs), instead of by means of words (or conventional signs). Hysterical language thus resembles other picture languages, such as charades. Those who want to deal with so-called hysterical patients must therefore learn not how to diagnose or treat them, but how to understand their special idiom and how to translate it into ordinary language.

La primavera no tiene lenguaje, sólo un grito. Aun así, más cruel que abril es la serpiente del tiempo.

Pay no attention to them, ladies, I beg of you, said Gant scathingly. They are the lowest of the low, the whiskey-besotted dregs of humanity, who deserve to bear not even the name of men, so far have they retrograded backwards. With a flourishing sweep of his slouch hat he departed into the warehouse. By God! said Ambrose Nethersole approvingly. It takes W. O. to tie a knot in the tail of the English language. It always did.

good deeds can be shortly stated but where wrong is done a wealth of language is needed to veil its deformity.

There are worse words than cuss-words, there are words that hurt.

Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary.

The Levant, the land to the east of the Mediterranean, is almost without doubt the region in which the 'Semitic' family of tongues originated, and Arabic has preserved, pristine, many of the earliest features of those tongues.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucked than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.

They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lives mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself.

He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic packets of language.

The rock- it's talking. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam- it truly talks.

The thing about a story is that you dream it is you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head

NhÆ°ng h?n tá»± h?i Ä'ích xác ra thì c?m xúc chân th?t nh?t c?a nàng là gì, ý nàng là sao khi nàng nói tan mà h?p.

They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it. They found jokes to tell. They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness.

Words, too, have a genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

I invested them with a bogus nobility. To a suburban kid they seemed so special, enduring, wild and stiff-necked, in amongst the ancient rocks and gnarled trees, and while it was true enough they carried their secret places in their bodies and in their language, many simply wore their ordinary, dreary undigested pasts like rain-sodden greatcoats and lived like cripples.

In this crowded world, we must learn to navigate by speech, as ancient mariners taught themselves to sail across the Aegean Sea.

A m?vészek úgy aránylanak az emberi beszédhez, mint a felfedezÅ'k az utazáshoz.

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

A certain degree of audiovisual hallucination happens when we read poetry.

Simplicity, clarity, complexity, and ambiguity are not mutually exclusive states in language; the sensitive typographer is one who can manifest these states in the right mix by controlling the elements at his or her disposal.